


Second Chances

by osprey_archer



Series: Requiem [2]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Community: hc_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 17:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eponine intends to go back to the streets after telling Cosette about Marius's death. But Fauchelevent insists on trying to talk her out of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Chances

Late in the night, long after the church bells had rung midnight, Eponine slipped out of bed. She moved quietly, stealthily ( _like the rat I am_ , she thought, with a painful private pride), so that Cosette slept on. 

Cosette continued to sleep as Eponine dressed in Cosette’s blue-sprigged white dress; the dress Cosette had worn when Eponine told her of Marius’s death. The bloodstains had mostly washed out, but Eponine could still see their ghost edges on the cloth. 

Even if the dress had come completely clean, Eponine knew Cosette would never wear it again. So it was not really stealing to take it. 

She glanced at Cosette, still sleeping: she took laudanum to help her sleep, now, since Marius’s death. Her golden hair looked silvery in the moonlight, her face unearthly and...sad, even as she slept. Eponine felt a lump grow in her throat. 

She turned away and eased open the door to Cosette’s room and slipped into the apartment. She shut it behind her, softly, softly, and almost as softly a deep voice said, “Eponine?” 

Eponine turned. Cosette’s papa Fauchelevent stood in the doorway of his room in a dressing gown. 

Damn the man. Cosette had slept through all of Eponine’s preparations; how had _he_ heard her? 

“I’m leaving,” she said, still quietly, because she did not want to wake Cosette, and crossed the room toward the outer door. 

Fauchelevent crossed to the door too, looming in front of it. “Why?” he asked. 

“I don’t need looking after anymore,” Eponine said. “And I’m not the sort of girl it’s nice for Cosette to know, so I’m off. I’ll be all right.” Crushed by grief, maybe, but that’d make it easier to sell herself in the streets - which is what she’d have to do, if she didn’t go back to her parents. And she wasn’t sure how she’d find them, anyway. 

Or she could go back to Montparnasse. But that was just another way of selling herself, really. 

“I wish you would reconsider, Eponine,” Fauchelevent said. 

“Why? Does it make things easier for you to have your charity project living with you? No more tramping around those dirty tenements now, I suppose, and worrying that another one of them might try to kidnap you like Papa did.” 

“No,” he said, and she hated him for being so calm and not caring at all how she tried to hurt him. “I wish you would stay for Cosette.”

Eponine’s throat closed. “She’ll be happier without me. Without anyone to remind her of Marius every day - ” 

“Do you think she needs to be reminded of Marius to think about him all the time?” 

Eponine hated him more. Of course not. Of course she didn’t. Of course Eponine thought of him all the time, too. 

Except sometimes, when she and Cosette were strolling in the park, or went out to buy bread, or just got to talking; and then sometimes, sometimes she forgot for a bit, and then hated herself for betraying him. It was her fault Marius was dead: she should not forget him for a second. Once she lived on the streets, she would never be happy enough to forget him by accident. 

Fauchelevent still blocked the door. “You give her something else to think about,” he said. “It’s good for her to have someone to look after.”

“So get her a kitten,” Eponine sneered, and then was embarrassed. Cosette had been kind to her, a thousand times kinder than Eponine deserved, and Eponine repaid her by talking about her like she was just a selfish bourgeois twit? “Or adopt a gamin off the street. Not like there’s a shortage, is there? Unless they all got shot on the barricades.” 

She saw Gavroche’s body again in her mind. Why’d he have to haunt her now? She never thought about him much when he was alive. 

“It wouldn’t be the same,” said Fauchelevent. “It is also...good for her,” he continued, and Eponine looked in his face again. Easy enough now, because he wasn’t looking at her: he had his eyes averted, downcast, like it hurt him to talk. “It’s good for her to have someone who shares her grief.” 

Eponine looked at him. “You aren’t sorry at all that Marius is dead,” she said. 

His head dropped lower still. “I - “ he began. 

“It’s all my fault, you know,” she told him. “I suppose Cosette told you. She left him a note, and I stole it, I didn’t give it to him, so he thought he would never see her again. She knows that part. But she doesn’t know that I told him to go to the barricades; I told him his friends were waiting. I wanted us to die together, the two of us, because it seemed better than letting him live happy with anyone else. I’m a monster, don’t you see? Let me go back to the gutter where I belong. Gavroche, Gavroche was much better than me, but he died. It’s always the ones who don’t deserve it that die.” 

Now it was Eponine who couldn’t look at Fauchelevent. She paced, fists clenched at her sides, and words bubbled out of her. “Gavroche was my brother,” she said. “He was a gamin, a street kid, he barely ever came home. I knew a few of his friends, though, I could pick out a nice one for you and Cosette to adopt. He was a nice kid, my brother, you wouldn’t know him for a Thenardier. Maybe he was a bastard. Maybe that’s why Mama always hated him.”

She paused for a moment, then plunged forward in her story. “He died on the barricades, Gavroche did. Do you know what happened? No one knows what happened. Let me tell you. Our grand revolution, it lasted less than a day. The soldiers stormed up the barricades, and Marius ran for the gunpowder, but the soldiers shot him. I should have been there, I should have stopped it, only Gavroche - I got distracted by Gavroche.

“Only I didn’t stay to protect Gavroche either. I didn’t protect either of them. When I saw that Marius was shot I ran after him, I forgot all about Gavroche just then. Marius was already dying. He collapsed just inside the door of the tavern, and I pulled him into the corner and put his head on my lap. I showed him Cosette’s note then. ‘See!’ I said. ‘She loves you!’ And he touched the note before he died, he was smiling. That was generous of me, wasn’t it?” she asked, spinning on Fauchelevent.

“Yes,” he said, but she wasn’t really listening. 

“And that’s when the soldiers came in,” she said. “Just after he died. And there was shooting - only I don’t remember it, because one of them hit me in the head with the butt of his rifle, and it all goes black for a while, and when I woke up again there was nothing. No noise, I mean. Marius was cold already, and the tavern was dark, and the stench…”

The smell of blood and gunpowder rose up in her throat again. She gagged on it, and pressed a hand to her mouth, tears coming into her eyes. 

But she did not throw up. Eventually she continued, her voice muffled behind her hand. “It was not silent,” she said. “Only it seemed so, after the bullets and shouting. That woke me, I think, the quiet... One of the students - such an ugly man - knelt over Enjolras’ body. He was the leader, Enjolras; this was all his fault, you know. He shot Javert - I remember now - he shot Javert just before the soldiers came in, just like he said he would, and that must have been the last thing Marius saw before he died, my God - ”

“Javert?” said Fauchelevent. “Javert is dead?”

His tone was so urgent, so insistent, that it dragged Eponine out of her memories. She was a Thenardier; in the urgency of his tone she heard the possibility of an advantage for herself. “Shot through the head,” she said, studying Fauchelevent’s face, and smiled when she saw a tiny, an almost imperceptible relaxation around his eyes. 

Only a criminal would be so relieved in the death of a police inspector. 

They looked at each other, Fauchelevant and Eponine. “So,” said Eponine, the small nasty smile tugging at her lips. “I know something about you, just like you know something about me. Something you don’t want Cosette to know. So now will you let me go?” 

Fauchelevant looked surprised. “I’m not going to keep you here against your will,” he said. “I want to talk you out of going. But I won’t stop you if you do decide to go. But,” he said, raising a hand when Eponine started for the door, “I think you should wait until morning so you can tell Cosette you are going.”

Eponine stopped dead again. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t tell Cosette.” 

“It will break her heart if you leave without even a word,” said Fauchelevent. 

“And I’ve already done enough to hurt her, and shouldn’t add to it?” said Eponine. “I know. I know. And you think I can make it up to her by sticking around so she’ll have something to look after, or something like that, to distract her. I’ll be _good_ for her.” 

“I do think you are good for her,” Fauchelevent said. Eponine snorted, turning away, but he continued, “But that’s not why I want you to stay. You deserve a second chance at life.” 

“Ha! Have you listened to me at all? I deserve to die in the gutter, me!” 

“Because you think it’s your fault that Marius is dead?” said Fauchelevent. “But that’s just as much my fault as yours. When I learned of Marius, I decided to take Cosette away from Paris. That is why she left him the note that you stole. If I had not decided to interfere, you never could have interfered either. And why is it not at all Marius’s fault that he decided to throw his life away?” 

It was as if he had punched the air out of her: she was so horrified that for a moment she could not speak. “He did it for love!” Eponine cried. “He couldn’t live without love. No one can.” 

“And I am just as guilty as you,” he reminded her. “And maybe neither of us deserve a second chance. But how can we do penance? It will only make Cosette more unhappy, if we’re as miserable as perhaps we deserve, and how can we make recompense by making her more miserable yet? It would make us feel better to do penance. Maybe we don’t deserve that.” 

Eponine opened her mouth to reply, but Fauchelevent continued, almost talking to himself. “I am what I am today,” he said, “because someone gave me a second chance I didn’t think I deserved, after I had repaid his kindness with betrayal.” He tried to look her in the eye, but she twisted her head away. “So please, Eponine, stay.” 

To her horror, Eponine began to sob, great ugly sobs that tore at her throat and sucked at her lungs so she could not breathe. She sat hard on the sofa. If she had cried like this at home, so loud and obnoxious, her father would only have thrown a shoe at her head and told her to shut up.

She couldn’t soften the sobs. The door to Cosette’s room opened. “Eponine?” A candle illuminated Cosette’s face, crinkled with concern. “Eponine? What’s wrong?” 

Eponine was sobbing too hard to speak. She tried to stand up, to flee, but Cosette knelt at her feet and took Eponine’s rough cold hands between her own. “Eponine, don’t go,” she said. “Let me help you, please stay.”

Cosette did not know what she was saying: she only wanted Eponine to stay in the conversation, she did not know that Eponine had been planning to run away. Eponine knew that, but still it made her cry harder. 

She ran out of tears in the end. She looked up, eyes burning, to realize with surprise that Cosette had not let go of her hands. “Eponine,” said Cosette. She kissed Eponine’s hands, light as a butterfly, looking up at Eponine with the candle light shining on the tears in her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“I - ” said Eponine, her voice rusty, as if her tears had burned her throat. “Me, that’s what’s wrong.” 

Cosette looked at her, puzzled. Eponine could not bear her gaze, and looked away, looked around the room for Fauchelevent. Fauchelevent the criminal - he could understand her. Cosette was too innocent. Oh, she had suffered with the Thenardiers, but it was an innocent suffering, she had never done anything _wrong_. 

Cosette was innocent: she did not deserve to suffer. Eponine felt, then, the force of Fauchelevent’s argument. If Eponine’s suffering would hurt Cosette, then perhaps she should not punish herself, no matter how much she deserved it. 

Fauchelevent stood by the window, almost hidden in the shadows. Eponine looked at him a moment, hoping that in looking she could let him know she understood, and then forced herself to look back at Cosette’s kind, searching eyes. Cosette wanted to understand: she wanted to take care of Eponine.

It had been years since anyone had taken care of Eponine. 

“I’m...I’m so tired,” Eponine whispered, and even as she spoke a heavy tiredness seemed to settle on her, as muffling as a blanket of snow. Despite the July warmth she shivered. 

Cosette let go of Eponine’s hands. “You can rest here,” Cosette said, unwinding the shawl from her shoulders. “As long as you need to.” And she gently draped her body-warm shawl around Eponine. 

Eponine wanted to shrug the shawl off. It was July, it was more than warm enough. But she let it settle around her, and pulled it tight at her throat. It was little enough, but it was something, at least, that she could do for Cosette.


End file.
